Doctors struggle to recognise depression

Many GPs in the UK find it hard to tell the difference between patients who do and do not have depression, according to a new study in the Lancet.

Researchers at the University of Leicester studied data on more than 50,000 patients which were contained in 41 previously published trials.

They found that GPs were more likely to make the wrong diagnosis than the right one.

Overall, doctors were only able to recognise around half of people who had clinical depression.

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The researchers noted that their findings should not be viewed as a criticism of GPs, 'but rather a call for better understanding of the problems that non-specialists face'.

'No data suggest that GPs do worse than other non-psychiatric medical colleagues,' they added.

Dr Andrew McCullogh, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, revealed that he was unsurprised by the findings.

'GPs have too little time and sometimes too little training to always diagnose mental illness accurately, despite the fact that at least a third of their caseload will be mental-health related,' he told the BBC.

According to mental health charity Mind, at least one in six people becomes depressed during their lifetime, while one in 20 are severely or 'clinically' depressed.

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